


you will hear thunder and remember me

by SearchingforSerendipity



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: AU of Briar's book, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, In which it is Briar that gets the pox and Tris decides to take matters into her own hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 04:58:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7877455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Storms, it must be said, are fickle, furious things. It is in their nature to eat light and conquer the sky, every thunder cloud a battalion in a war since the birth of the world. </p><p>Tris is not a warrior. She is a scholar, a student of things. She is sensitive and silly and occasionally sensible.  There was always a little more storm to her than to most children.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you will hear thunder and remember me

 

 

Briar Moss falls ill. That is to to be expected from someone holed up in a quarantined hospital, and irreversible in a child that had had lived in the guts of slimy streets up until a year ago. Briar falls and Rosethorn turns to iron, all narrow silences and brittle days. Sandry sews, weaves, holds a limp calloused hand in hers. Daja keeps watch and keeps to her gods, faithful and fearful.

Tris listens. She can't hear everything, because sometimes sounds are very far away, and sometimes they're close enough to scrape at her skin. She listens to some of it: the prayers and the looms and the slow troubled breaths turn to coughing, turn to almost stillness.

The wind howls at the thatched roof, a memory of warmer days, though it is summer again. It smells of sun-baked dirt , of hot compressed air far away. Not here. Here the world is too still, the ground dry as pocked skin. The rain that had helped the contaminated water spread was gone now, leaving a poisonous sort of air. No wind flows here that does not carry a last rattling sigh.

One night after the fever, long after the coughing sets in, after a heavy nigh after a heavier day, she hears the adults talking. She had begged Niko to let her help at Crane's, to let her be useful, but he said he had need of her though he never took her anywhere, and Lark wouldn't hear of her leaving the house. Water was being rationed and they needed her housekeeping skills.

It turned out to be a good idea when, nine days into Briar's coughing, Dedicate Crane died. They said he had slipped some essence of the pox into his hamdd and hidden the effects until the last possible moment. He'd taken care not to spread it among his helpers but it had been too late for him. Rosethorn took over at once, but she was alone now. More mages died everyday. In his bed by the shrunken shakkaan Briar's lungs creaked, crumpled.

The adults were scared, scared enough to forget she could catch their whispered words in the air.

Dedicate Moonstream had been there that morning, before she was awake. Her verdict was such: Briar was dying. He was not the only one. Rosethorn mentioned a means to a cure, an old identifying essence she and the best of her colleagues had worked at, but without pure water there was no hope for that.

Tris had heard enough. She made for the top of the wall. Niko had stood here with her, nearly a month ago, and taught her how to feel the winds. He had told her that there were clouds far away, pregnant with precious clean water, evaporated from the untouched mountains and deep seas, healthy sweat and fruitful fields. He had told her not to go find it; it would kill her, drain her life-force utterly.

Tris will never forgive herself for listening to him then, but that's alright. She won't have to live with it much longer.

She goes out out to meet them, arms out, hands catching and releasing. Searching for the right one. Above the sea she soars, catching the best of the winds in her arms, giving them salt and sureness. Some of them are stubborn, but she is Trisana Chandler. She is nothing if not stubborn.

And strong. Stronger yet with her friends, but to wake them now would be to pass on her guilt. She had stood here before and watched helpless people drown in waves of her own making. She has carried that with her every day since: it is not a legacy she wishes to pass on. 

A cold wind blows, whimsical. She recognizes the taste of it. With a start she realizes it is water from Northern Emelen, from the iceberg she and her friends had walked through. It had been weeks and weeks since, but the water remembers her. It drifts closer, now a mountainous nimbus, now a long thready wisp. It longs for her and she longs for it, too greedy, too generous. 

Tris gave herself a moment to feel her awareness of Daja hammering spelled boxes in her sleep, Sandry and Lark at their weaving in the candlelight. Briar in a circle of plants, fighting to live. Even under by dead green things, he loved life so well.

Tris listened to all this. She made sure none of them heard her goodbyes.

And then she _spun_ a storm.

 

 

Storms, it must be said, are fickle, furious things. It is in their nature to eat light and conquer the sky, every thunder cloud a battalion in a war since the birth of the world. Tris is not a warrior. She is a scholar, a student of things. She is sensitive and silly and occasionally sensible.  There was always a little more storm to her than to most children. 

It is not an unbecoming. It is not a becoming either, but it is a storm. It is skyfire and shadows flying and sunsets soaring away under the press of a single girl's desperation. 

It is loud. Listen. Can't you hear her coming?

 

 

In a cottage under weary starlight, a girl yells herself awake. Her ears ring with a clash like the mother of all hammers. Another lets a spindle fall, wool spilling in streams to the floor. In her pocket a lump unwinds, an empty space among three others. A boy shivers in his sleep, coughs, shudders, weeps. His dreams are terrible and he will never forget them.

It rains for nine days straight. It's a heavy, cold rain, wetting dry fields and dry skin. Keys are found, cures are made. Wells swell, swell. Funeral pyres flicker, high, so high.

Briar Moss lives. He did not ask for it, but the storm and the new, gifted strength gives him no choice. A blood-gift, he calls it, and resents it deeply. Three children gather together, huddle close. Rage at the rain together and apart. It thunders at them, purple-white and staggering loud; it rages back, at the children, at the sea, at everything.

A guard finds a pair of cracked glasses in he sand under the wall. Niklraen Gold-eye cries. The children and their carers cry. They toss the glasses to the sea.

None of the rain ever touches them. Above, the sky spills itself out, sobs. It seems to cry with them.

 

  
Thunderstorms listen. They is not very good at it, because they have in themselves a vestige of Trisana Chandler and so nothing they are nothing if not stubborn, and listening takes patience. Temperamental as they are, thunder is not very patient. But the wind is a lofty friend, and chatty besides, borrowing whispers and secrets and shouts to make a tapestry of their points, and Tris has to exist beside it now. She has to; there is no thunder without wind, after all, because the wind is what takes it places and let's it thunder. Lightening is quieter. Kind, in its out straightforward way. The way it falls down, sure as time, reminds her of another friend labor force another fire.

The earth is far away and too close. close enough to echo off, to push against and press close. Like bantering, or an embrace.

The sea always welcomes them. It is, they decide, close enough to home.

 

 

 

 _You will hear thunder and remember me,_  
And think: she wanted storms. The rim  
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,  
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

 _That day in Moscow, it will all come true,_  
when, for the last time, I take my leave,  
And hasten to the heights that I have longed for,  
Leaving my shadow still to be with you.

 

_You Will Hear Thunder, Anna Ahkmotova_

 

 

 


End file.
